90% SSL sites vulnerable to the BEAST SSL attack
Apr 27, 2012
90% of the Internet's top 200,000 HTTPS-enabled websites are vulnerable to known types of SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) attack, according to a report released Thursday by the Trustworthy Internet Movement (TIM), a nonprofit organization dedicated to solving Internet security, privacy and reliability problems. The report is based on data from a new TIM project called SSL Pulse , which uses automated scanning technology developed by security vendor Qualys, to analyze the strength of HTTPS implementations on websites listed in the top one million published by Web analytics firm Alexa. SSL Pulse checks what protocols are supported by the HTTPS-enabled websites (SSL 2.0, SSL 3.0, TLS 1.0, TLS 1.1, etc.), the key length used for securing communications (512 bits, 1024 bits, 2048 bits, etc.) and the strength of the supported ciphers (256 bits, 128 bits or lower). The BEAST attack takes advantage of a flaw in SSL 3.0, allowing the attacker to grab and decrypt HTTPS cookies on an end user'